He felt Bill grasp one of his ankles, Beverly the other. He sucked his belly in as far as he could. A moment later he came tumbling through the window. Bill grabbed him. Both of them almost fell over. Ben couldn't look at Bev. He had never in his life been as embarrassed as he was at that moment.

'Y-Y-You okay, m-m-man?'

'Yeah.'

Bill laughed shakily. Beverly joined him, and then Ben was able to laugh a little too, although it would be years before he could see anything remotely funny in what had happened.

'Hey!' Richie called down. 'Eddie needs help, okay?'

'O-O-Okay.' Bill and Ben took up positions below the window. Eddie came through on his back. Bill got his legs just above the knees.

'Watch what you're doing,' Eddie said in a querulous, nervous voice. 'I'm ticklish.'

'Ramon ees plenny teekeleesh, senhorr,' Richie's voice called down.

Ben got Eddie around the waist, trying to keep his hand away from the cast and the sling. The two of them manhandled Eddie through the cellar window like a corpse. Eddie cried out once, but that was all.

'Eh-Eh –Eddie?'

'Yeah,' Eddie said, 'okay. No big deal.' But large drops of sweat stood out on his forehead and he was breathing in quick rasps. His eyes darted around the cellar.

Bill stepped back again. Beverly stood near him, now holding the Bullseye by the shaft and the cup, ready to fire if necessary. Her eyes swept the cellar constantly. Richie came through next, followed by Stan and Mike. Both of the latter moved with a smooth grace that Ben deeply envied. Then they were all down, down in the cellar where Bill and Richie had seen It only a month before.

The room was dim, but not dark. Dusky light shafted in through the windows and pooled on the dirt floor. The cellar seemed very big to Ben, almost too big, as if he were witnessing an optical illusion of some sort. Dusty rafters crisscrossed overhead. The furnace-pipes were rusty. Some sort of duty white cloth hung from the water-pipes in dirty strings and strands. The smell was down here too. A dirty yellow smell. Ben thought: It's here, all right. Oh yeah.

Bill started toward the stairs. The others fell in behind him. He halted at their foot and glanced underneath. He reached under with one foot and kick-pawed something out. They looked at it wordlessly. It was a white clown-glove, now streaked with dirt and dust.

'Uh-uh-upstairs,' he said.

They went up and emerged into a dirty kitchen. One plain straight-backed chair stood marooned in the center of the humped hillocky linoleum. That was it for furniture. There were empty liquor bottles in one corner. Ben could see others in the pantry. He could smell booze — wine, mostly — and old stale cigarettes. Those smells were dominant, but that other smell was there, too. It was getting stronger all the time.

Beverly went to the cupboards and opened one of them. She screamed piercingly as a blackish-brown Norway rat tumbled out almost into her face. It struck the counter with a plop and glared around at them with its black eyes. Still screaming, Beverly raised the Bullseye and pulled the sling back.

'NO!' Bill roared.

She turned her pale terrified face toward him. Then she nodded and relaxed her arm, the silver ball unfired — but Ben thought she had been very, very close. She backed up slowly, ran into Ben, jumped. He put an arm around her, tight.

The rat scurried down the length of the counter, jumped to the floor, ran into the pantry, and was gone.

'It wanted me to shoot at it,' Beverly said in a faint voice. 'Use up half of our ammunition on it.'

'Yes,' Bill said. 'It's l-l-like the FBI training r-range at Quh-Quh-Quantico, in a w-w-way. They seh-send y-you down this f-f-hake street and p-pop up tuh-hargets. If you shuh –shoot any honest citizens ih-instead of just cruh-crooks, you l-lose puh-hoints.'

'I can't do this, Bill,' she said. 'I'll mess it up. Here. You.' She held the Bullseye out, but Bill shook his head.

'You h-h-have to, B-Beverly.'

There was a mewling from another cupboard.

Richie walked toward it.

'Don't get too close!' Stan barked. 'It might — '

Richie looked inside and an expression of sick disgust crossed his face. He slammed the cupboard shut with a bang that produced a dead echo in the empty house.

'A litter.' Richie sounded ill. 'Biggest litter I ever saw . . . anyone ever saw, probably.' He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. There's hundreds of them in there.' He looked

at them, his mouth twitching a little on one side. 'Their tails . . . they were all ta ngled up, Bill. Knotted together.' He grimaced. 'Like snakes.'

They looked at the cupboard door. The mewling was muffled but still audible. Rats, Ben thought, looking at Bill's white face and, over Bill's shoulder, Mike's ashy-gray one. Everyone's ascared of rats. It knows it, too.

'C-C-Come on,' Bill said. 'H-Here on Nuh-Nuh-Neibolt Street, the f-f-fun just neh-hever stops.'

They went down the front hall. Here the unlovely smells of rotting plaster and old urine were intermixed. They were able to look out at the street through dirty panes of glass and see their bikes. Bev's and Ben's were heeled over on their kickstands. Bill's leaned against a stunted maple tree. To Ben the bikes looked a thousand miles away, like things seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The deserted street with its casual patchings of asphalt, the faded humid sky, the steady ding-ding-ding of a locomotive running on a siding . . . these things seemed like dreams to him, hallucinations. What was real was this squalid hallway with its stinks and shadows.

There was a shatter of broken brown glass in one corner — Rheingold bottles.

In the other corner, wet and swelled, was a digest-sized girlybook. The woman on the cover was bent over a chair, her skirt up in the back to show the tops of her fishnet hose and her black panties. The picture did not look particularly sexy to Ben, nor did it embarrass him that Beverly had also glanced at it. Moisture had yellowed the woman's skin and moisture had humped the cover in ripples that became wrinkles on her face. Her salacious wink had become the leer of a dead whore.

(Years later, as Ben recounted this, Bev suddenly cried out, startling all of them — they were not so much listening to the story as reliving it. 'It was her!' Bev yelled. 'Mrs Kersh! It was her!')

As Ben looked, the young/old crone on the girlybook cover winked at him. She wiggled her fanny in an obscene come-on.

Cold all over, yet sweating, Ben looked away.

Bill pushed open a door on the left and they followed him into a vaultlike room that might once have been a parlor. A crumpled pair of green pants was hung over the light-fixture which depended from the ceiling. Like the cellar, this room seemed much too big to Ben, almost as long as a freight-car. Much too long for a house as small as this one had appeared from the outside —

Oh, but that was outside, a new voice spoke inside his mind. It was a jocular, squealing voice, and Ben realized with sudden numbing certainty that he was hearing Pennywise Itself; Pennywise was speaking to him on some crazy mental radio. Outside, things always looksmaller than they really are, don't they, Ben?

'Go away,' he whispered.

Richie turned to look at him, his face still strained and pale. 'You say something?'

Ben shook his head. The voice was gone. That was an important thing, a good thing. Yet

(outside)

he had understood. This house was a special place, a kind of station, one of the places in Derry, one of the many, perhaps, from which It wa s able to find its way into the overworld. This stinking rotted house where everything was somehow wrong. It wasn't just that it seemed too big; the angles were wrong, the perspective crazy. Ben was standing just inside the door between the parlor and the hallway and the others were moving away from him across a space that now looked almost as big as Bassey Park . . . but as they moved away, they seemed to grow larger instead of smaller. The floor seemed to slope, and —